Center for Organizational Research faculty workshop

THE PRACTICALITY OF PRACTICE THEORY
Martha S. Feldman and Monica Worline

Discussants: Melissa Mazmanian and Gerardo Okhuysen

Friday, March 13 12:00-1:30pm
Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway SBSG 1321

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by March 8. A light lunch will be provided.

THE PRACTICALITY OF PRACTICE THEORY

Abstract

The world of work is increasingly fast-paced and complex requiring flexibility in organizational action and management. In this context theories of practice have gained momentum and popularity as ways of studying emerging organizational and management practices. We explore the potential for these theories to be of practical use not only to scholars but also to people, including managers, working in organizations. We first introduce the scholarly foundations important to understanding how practice theorists explain the world and then illustrate the practicality of practice theory by providing managerial and organizational examples of three basic features of practice theory in use. We conclude by focusing on “active resourcing,” an idea based in practice theory. We show in two different contexts how active resourcing influences organizational outcomes and how managers can encourage active resourcing.

MARTHA S. FELDMAN (Stanford University PhD, 1983) is the Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public Management and Professor of Social Ecology, Business, Political Science and Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her current research on organizational routines explores the role of performance and agency in creating, maintaining and altering these fundamental organizational phenomena. She is a Senior Editor for Organization Science and serves on editorial boards of several management and public management journals. She received the Administrative Science Quarterly’s 2009 award for Scholarly Contribution and the 2011 Academy of Management Practice Scholarship Award. In 2014, she received an honorary doctorate in economics from St. Gallen University Business School and was listed by Thompson Reuters as a highly cited author.

MONICA WORLINE, (University of Michigan Ph.D, 2004) is an organizational psychologist and President of Vervago, Inc., a company dedicated to research and teaching that supports organizations to make the most of their intellectual capital through effective development of courageous thinking, compassionate leadership, and creating an environment that brings people alive. Monica is an award-winning teacher and interdisciplinary scholar who has served on the faculties of Goizueta Business School at Emory University, the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California Irvine, and the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology. Her writing has been featured in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, the Chicago Tribune, and BizEd Magazine and her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science.

“Practice Research: An Alternative Methodology for Qualitative Research”

Torsten Schmid
Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research
University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Friday, February 20
12:00-1:30pm
**SSPA 2112** (note location other than for previous COR events)

Light lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by February 15.

This workshop offers an interactive introduction into practice research as an alternative methodology for qualitative research. A practice perspective has become increasingly influential and applied to the study of phenomena as different as knowledge, culture, technology, routines or policy-making. The practice turn not just offers a conceptual alternative to existing social and cultural theories (“practice theory”). It has also developed into an innovative and inspiring re-search strategy (“practice methodology”) that differs from and complements more established approaches, such as grounded theory, case study or discourse analysis. The workshop provides a user’s perspective on common principles and practices of a practice methodology. A major focus will be on how a practice lens opens up a unique way to study and re-conceptualize axiomatic categories of social life, taking the weathered concept of “power” as exemplar. The workshop reports on a late-stage empirical project that attempts to do just that and engages participants in a practice-based analysis of data from this study.

Short bio: Torsten Schmid is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research and Strategic Man-agement at University of St. Gallen (a leading European business school, located in Switzerland). In my research, I aim at understanding and informing the fundamental transformation and re-structuring of large, complex corporations. My current research interests center around the ques-tion of how these organizations enact and cope with related power dynamics. For this, I combine various practice theories with extended, ethnographically informed, longitudinal and collaborative, field studies of strategic change programs at leading European firms. My work is motivated by the potential of practice theory to develop alternative relational conceptualizations of power that integrate the functionalist concern for effective strategic leadership with the critical agenda of human emancipation. Following a pragmatist tradition, I aim for research that has a human orientation and is practically useful. My interest in power dynamics in the context of large-scale strategic change is, therefore, also motivated by a concern for learning from and educating employees and executives on how to maintain a collective capacity to act in current conflictual set-tings.

This practice orientation also informs my teaching that comprises innovative practice-based formats in strategic management and qualitative methods, including graduate and PhD courses at various universities. I am also in charge of consulting qualitative research projects at my university. A collaborative research project with Prof. Martha S. Feldman brings me to UCI where I look very much forward to writing, teaching and engaging with fellow scholars.

Colloquium (Co-sponsored by Paul Merage School of Business and COR)

Monday, February 9
3:00-4:30pm
SB1 5400 (5th floor Colloquium Terrace)

Prof. Gabriel Rossman
Department of Sociology, UCLA

“Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange”

ABSTRACT
This article develops a model of how the structure of exchange can manage such disreputable exchanges as the commensuration of sacred for profane. Whereas existing research discusses the rhetorical reframing of exchange, I highlight structures that obfuscate whether an exchange is occurring and thereby mitigate exchange taboos. I identify three such exchange structures: bundling, brokerage, and gift exchange. Bundling uses cross-subsidization across multiple innocuous exchanges to synthesize a taboo exchange. Brokerage finds a third party to accept responsibility for exchange. Gift exchange delays reciprocity and reframes exchanges as expressions of friendship. All three strategies have alternative meanings and so provide plausible deniability to taboo commensuration. The article concludes by arguing that these sorts of exchange structures represent a synthesis of “nothing but” reductionism and “hostile worlds” moralism, rather than an alternative to them as Viviana Zelizer suggests.

Talk co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and COR

Be Careful What You Regulate: Sarbanes-Oxley and Banks’ Growing Appetite for Risky Derivatives

Frank Dobbin
Professor of Sociology
Harvard University

Friday, January 23, 2015
12:00-1:30pm
SSPB 4250

Abstract:

In the wake of the Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco scandals in the early years of the new millennium, Washington passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to restrain corporate malfeasance and excessive risk-taking. Many commercial banks responded by appointing Chief Risk Officers to monitor risk exposure. Institutionalists have found that professionals tasked with regulatory compliance over-comply, expanding their own corporate role by exaggerating likelihood of government sanction. We argue that Chief Risk Officers, trained to maximize risk-adjusted returns, took a different tack, touting their capacity to comply with the law, but meanwhile bringing their firms to the edge of the risk cliff so as to maximize shareholder value. They thus transformed themselves from compliance officers to central actors in the shareholder value revolution. Two groups proved capable of preventing CROs from over-investing in risky derivatives: CEOs who held substantial equity in the firm, and institutional investors who held large positions in the firm. We contribute to institutional theory by showing another path by which professions can use regulatory compliance to gain a foothold in the firm, and highlighting the importance of internal power relations in determining corporate strategy.